


the compass realigns itself

by fallencrest



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Gen, M/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension, kingsguard!Jon 'verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-18
Updated: 2012-03-18
Packaged: 2017-11-02 03:37:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/364550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallencrest/pseuds/fallencrest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jon adjusts to his new life as a member of Stannis’ Kingsguard. Most things have changed but the man he now calls his king has not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the compass realigns itself

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [linndechir](http://linndechir.livejournal.com/) for the 2nd round of [got_exchange](http://got-exchange.livejournal.com). (Originally posted [here](http://got-exchange.livejournal.com/23192.html#cutid1) on LJ.)

Jon stands at his king’s side in the throne-room all day. The petitions are tedious and every time some new supplicant comes and begins to pay the king homage, rather than putting forward their concerns as they ought, Jon looks to Stannis Baratheon to see the way his expression hardens with distaste.

He wonders if the people will ever learn to understand their king, how he is a better king than his brother: kinder, fairer and more just. He doubts it, sometimes. Common men care more for their king’s smiles than for his justice and the men at court are even worse: there is nothing more destructive to this nest of vipers and their schemes than a just man who will not stop short of his duty.

The petitions are long and tedious and, in between them, Stannis often looks to Jon.

It is a strange and new scenario, this standing at his king’s side. It is strange and new to call any king his own.

He stands now in a white cloak and fine mail in the throne-room at King’s Landing, the protector of a king, when a scant few months before he had stood atop a wall of ice, commanding the boundary between two worlds at war. With the war over, there was no boundary to guard anymore: his king had seen to that. With the war over, Jon had been left with as little place in the world as when he’d been known only as Ned Stark’s bastard son, but Stannis had seen to that, too. He’d made Jon kneel before him in the snow and given him a knighthood and the promise of a white cloak. Stannis Baratheon was always as good as his word.

Jon stands now as Ser Jon Snow of the Kingsguard, garbed in white, beside his king. He still has his bastard’s name and carries the ancestral sword of another man’s father. He has a scar left by an eagle and many from his comrades’ knives, and he is still shadowed, near everywhere he goes, by a silent white direwolf. These things are the same and many others are almost the same: Stannis Baratheon is the same, except that his position is different, that he is now the realm’s sole king and ruling it from the south; Jon himself is the same, except that he no longer holds a command or fights dead men and monsters so far north that none know of his deeds or even his existence.

It is awkward for both of them, this new positioning. They have become used to war and used to winter. They are used to fighting and seeing good men die because they gave the wrong order, or the right one, and they are used to an uneasy alliance forged on common goals. None of these things are the same now. Now they have a city and a castle, instead of a wall of ice and a battlefield. Now they have council meetings and petitions to hear and any wars are those of words and of attrition. Men rarely die here, though many might starve if Stannis Baratheon did not keep up these smaller, verbal wars with lords and merchants who care nothing for the needs of the small-folk they hold sway over.

Most of this is circumstantial and it changes little - they are still the same men they were at the Wall - but it is the power that has shifted. Stannis Baratheon is still a king but Jon Snow is no longer in command of a garrison and he no longer holds sway over something Stannis needs. Stannis had made threats at the Wall, of course, about how Jon was only still alive because he allowed him to be, but Jon had still held his own command then and it had been an idle threat. That had changed when he had knelt, knelt beneath the king’s sword on the frozen promontory of the Wall and risen a knight, knelt again in the Great Hall of the Red Keep and risen with a white cloak draped over his shoulders. He is Stannis Baratheon’s man now, his sworn shield, and it makes him less uneasy than he’d thought it would but Jon knows that it alters everything.

Jon had wondered what his place would be, when he went south with Stannis Baratheon. He’d felt a change in their relationship necessary, a sworn shield is not a counsellor, nor an ally: he is a subject. He is surprised to find the change in his position less evident than it ought to be. It should not be such a surprise: Stannis Baratheon had never called for his subjects to bow and scrape like sycophants and, now, when he reads dissent in Jon’s face he expects to hear the reason behind Jon’s disapproval.

In between one petition and the next, Stannis observes the crease of Jon Snow’s brow and asks him whether it is the foolishness of Lord Errol’s petition or the soundness of his own judgement on the matter which troubles him; and he scoffs when Jon begins with reluctance and the courtesy ‘your grace’ and not with instant candour.

But that is how it must be now, Jon thinks. At the Wall, it had been his duty and his place to uphold what he believed right for the Night’s Watch but he cannot presume to tell the king what judgements he should make in his own court. He does not deny the king his advice though and, when he has given it, Stannis Baratheon comes as close to smiling as he ever does and says, “You are perceptive as ever, ser, but I could not grant the conditions as they were asked. Lord Errol will return tomorrow with adapted terms, asking less of me, and I will give him the grain he needs at the proper rate and nothing more than that. He shall depart safe in the knowledge that his king is no fool and that I will not be moved to endorse his petty quarrels with his neighbours.”

Things are not, after all, so different as Jon thinks they ought to be. The only difference is that Jon stands now behind the throne and feels he ought to hold his peace. It is difficult not to be surprised the first few times that Stannis asks for his counsel but Jon is coming to realise, slowly, that he should always have expected this from Stannis. Stannis was never a proud man (not in the ways which count) and certainly not proud enough to turn away the advice of those he trusts. Jon supposes that Stannis must trust him by now, must have done to have brought him south; he must know by now that Jon will not be less than honest or say less than he believes true, when pressed.

He tries to shake off the strangeness of it, of the way so little has been altered as well as so much. He cannot quite get used to the Red Keep with its grandeur, or the way men incline their heads in homage to him in the street and children clamour excitedly when they see his white cloak and unemblazoned shield. It is difficult to adjust to a position he hadn’t dreamt of holding since he was a boy and didn’t know better. As a boy, he had dared to dream he might have Winterfell, too, but that dream had lasted only moments and, when Stannis had offered him the reality of it, he could not take it.

It was a thing to be wondered at that he’d accepted this second offer, a white cloak and a knighthood was not so different from a castle and a lordship, and perhaps his reason would not be apparent to an outsider. Weighing them both, it was not so much a question of honour which separated Lord Jon Stark of Winterfell and Ser Jon Snow of the Kingsguard but a question of Jon’s trust in Stannis Baratheon. The first offer had been made by one who had no regard for him and one who saw him as a weak-willed bastard boy who would make an easy puppet; the second was made by a near equal (though Stannis would never say as much) and made out of respect, meant to benefit them both.

Everything had changed between Stannis’ arrival at the Wall and his last departure from it, with Jon at his side. They had each proved to the other that they could be a worthy adversary and a worthy friend. There had still been the unease of their distinct agendas between them but neither would have had it any other way (because to see the other bend too far from his course would not have been worth the victory of winning him over).

Melisandre had once said that Stannis had grown to like him but it was not as simple as that, Jon knew; Stannis placed no weight on whether or not a man was likeable, it was the king’s respect he had won and it had been a difficult victory.

He had been afraid of losing that respect, when he bent the knee, but it had been a misguided fear; and Jon learns, slowly, as he stands at Stannis Baratheon’s side that, whilst much has changed, his position in his king’s regard has not. And, in the end, that matters more than the colour of his cloak or the grandeur of his castle. At Castle Black, he had been surrounded by men who he had needed to win to his cause and his success in doing so had been the only thing which had given him a place worth having, whilst it lasted. The same was true now. Without his king’s regard, his white cloak would make him nothing more than a bodyguard, with no purpose that could not be fulfilled by another man, but Stannis’ regard makes him more than that. Stannis treats him as an equal and an ally still and, in doing so, gives him a place more worthy than any Jon might have won without him.

It is dark by the time the last petitioner has been seen. Most kings would have gone to supper hours ago and sent their supplicants away but Stannis is no such king. He rises from the throne and turns to Jon. There is nothing in his look but the remembrance of Jon’s presence but that is more than enough. Neither of them speaks but, as they leave, Stannis slows his pace until they fall into step. It is more than enough.


End file.
